The relationship between politicians and senior officials has been on the reform agenda in many countries, often on the premise that balance between technical, nonpartisan appointments and ensuring the responsiveness of public servants to the policies of the current government could be improved (Matheson et al. 2007).
... See More + This paper examines an attempt to de-politicize senior civil service in Ukraine through the introduction of state secretaries, to understand whether the diagnosis of imbalance in this political/administrative interface was correct, and why the reform failed. The paper draws on a survey of government officials and experts as well as legal acts, available documents, articles, and personal interviews. The paper concludes that politicized civil service was a problem of form rather than function—the immediate problem was the undefined political role of the executive. It led to compression of the roles of policy makers and senior civil servants, making the reform ultimately irrelevant.
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Although much has been written on the traditional role and key responsibilities of a company secretary, these writings are not sufficient to fully prepare an individual for the enormous task undertaken.
... See More + The role of the company secretary has changed and this is both undisputed and understated. The secretarys role is no longer the same as it was a decade, let alone five years ago. This paper will look at some of the aspects of the role of the modern company secretary and the competencies that are required to succeed.
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Professional civil service recruitment is a core component of governance for development, as it is necessary for ensuring the capacity of civil servants, service delivery, fiscal sustainability, and proper salary management.
... See More + Through an ambitious mixed method approach, this study seeks to provide a political economy analysis of civil service recruitment in Comoros—a fragile and decentralized state with a relatively large portion of spending on government salaries. More specifically, it aims to explain the recent dramatic increases in the number of civil servants in Comoros. The paper presents three main findings from the analysis. First, in 2010, elections at the national and local levels were associated with the largest recruitment in the past decade, due in part to the interplay of informal institutions such as political clientelism with the current public financial management system. Second, the institutions involved in recruitment are not permanent; they are evolving with the balance of power between the national and island governments. Third, civil service recruitment respects qualification standards.
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A new measure of cross-national corruption is constructed based on the geographic distribution of public officials involved in cross-border corruption cases.
... See More + A comparison is made between the Public Administration Corruption Index (PACI) and perception-based measures, considers the extent to which differences between them are driven by systematic factors, and concludes that they are not. As more data on cases of cross-border bribery incidents become available, the PACI will provide an increasingly valid cross-national measure of corruption.
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Ratings for the Government's Central Public Administration Reform (CPAR) Project for Moldova were as follows: outcomes were satisfactory, risk to development outcome was substantial, Bank performance was satisfactory, and Grantee performance was moderately satisfactory.
... See More + Some lessons learned included: strong government ownership and commitment to CPAR proved to be essential for achieving results in the institutional reform project. Institutional reform such as CPAR depends on staff capacity to absorb and implement innovations: the importance of a capacity building strategy supporting implementation of CPAR reforms should not be underestimated. Long-term commitment in supporting government's reforms implementation process in the areas of institutional reorganization and capacity building bear fruit and have a greater chance to lead to more sustainable results. Linking government policies with the budget proves to be a challenging area and it is hard to make progress in environment, where demand for evidenced based policy making and budgeting is lacking. Advisory assistance in the design of public administration reforms and implementation planning is crucial when undertaking complex administrative reforms. Effective donor coordination increases the impact of the development assistance on the institutional reform and reduces administrative burden on the government. Transparency in institutional reforms implementation is crucial for building consensus on new policies among government and non-government stakeholders. Flexibility in implementation has contributed to successful completion of CPAR, but required a significant administrative effort by the Bank team constrained by a modest supervision budget.
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In February 2011, the government of Timor-Leste (GoTL) enacted a law creating a pension system for civil servants. However, the government now wants to repeal and replace this pension law as it deems it too broad in scope, coverage and cost, and it contains several non-standard design features.
... See More + In its place, the GoTL wants to consider creating a reformed permanent civil service pension program covering all civil servants. Within a few years thereafter, the government also wants to implement a national social security system. This system will cover formal sector workers, and it is likely civil servants will also participate. Consequently, civil servants may get benefits from both the national social security system and the civil service pension system. Timor-Leste has many civil servants with long service both before and after independence. The reformed pension system for civil servants will give the government a method of honorably allowing its elderly civil servants to exit the work force. At this time, the primary method of caring for elderly civil servants is to continue salary payments. This is because there is no mandatory retirement age for civil servants and the government does not yet have effective procedures for compelling older workers to retire when their productivity level declines. Consequently, the government has informed us that the civil service pension is unlikely to pay benefits to any civil servants until such time as these two issues are resolved. The government estimates this will take five years (until 2018). Until that time, elderly civil servants will continue to receive their salary and will not receive a pension from the reformed civil service pension program.
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The development objective of the Public Sector Modernization Project for Liberia is to improve pay and performance management in participating ministries, and strengthen payroll management in the civil service in Liberia.
... See More + The project has four components. The first component is improving pay management. This component addresses two key functional problems relating to salary levels: (i) the challenge of the civil service to attract and retain competent managerial and professional staffs; and (ii) low levels of motivation and engagement among existing civil servants which undermines individual work effort. The second component, strengthened payroll management will address two functional problems: (i) the lack of effective payroll discipline that has facilitated entries into the payroll without due process; and (ii) weak establishment control leading to escalating wage bill. The third component, improved performance will address one functional problem. That is, the challenge of management to hold staff accountable for their performance in ensuring service delivery. It will also address an important structural problem namely, overlapping mandates, and weak management structures for the civil service. The fourth component is project and program management. The objective of this component is to support the coordination and delivery of project inputs and overall implementation program.
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The adequacy of compensation for government workers and the affordability of the public sector wage bill are important concerns for many developing countries.
... See More + Suitable pay is considered a necessary -- albeit far from sufficient -- condition for attracting and retaining skilled public sector staff. This paper makes the case for conducting fine-grained analysis of pay and compensation issues in order to enable an accurate assessment of the challenges faced and thereby to generate good-fit reform recommendations that are both principled and feasible. The first part of the paper focuses on prevalent challenges in pay reform, both contextual and analytical. It builds on the experiences from three very different settings: Armenia, the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic, and Mongolia. The study begins by surveying some of the common difficulties in conducting granular analysis on civil service compensation. It then outlines a series of methodological approaches that can prove useful in developing comprehensive, targeted, and nuanced pay analyses and discusses how it is possible to overcome potential limitations in practice. The second half of the paper presents a case study of pay and compensation analysis in Lao PDR. The study illuminates how a number of these approaches can be combined in assessing a specific set of pay challenges and generating robust recommendations tailored to context. A brief postscript, with the benefit of hindsight on what subsequently happened on the ground in Lao PDR, reflects on the limitations of technical analysis in motivating reform implementation in practice.
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Ratings for the Economic Capacity Building Technical Assistance Project for Mongolia were as follows: outcomes were unsatisfactory; risk to development outcome was substantial; Bank performance was moderately unsatisfactory and borrower performance was also moderately unsatisfactory.
... See More + Some lessons learned includes: reforms cannot exceed the pace of capacity improvements. A suitable and country-specific time frame needs to be factored in the preparation for and the implementation of institutional-building activities and technical assistance components. Basics should be considered a priority before more sophisticated reforms are attempted. If basic take longer than envisaged then the introduction of the sophisticated reforms should be delayed. Large procurement packages are no substitute for adequate staffing of key government institutions to undertake large-scale reforms. Large-scale contracts for consultancy services are difficult to manage and require more absorptive capacity from the client agencies. Continual efforts are needed to consolidate gains, to advance reforms and ensure that the benefits from the reforms are released. Flexibility in design and adaption during implementation are crucial. So that support can be client and problem driven project teams must be in a position to adapt during implementation and respond to changing context.
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This 'Reforming Government Pay Setting Practices' report is a response to a request from the Polish Ministry of Finance (MOF) for technical advice on Poland's system of public sector pay.
... See More + The Ministry's primary aim is to contain the public sector wage bill as part of an overall effort to reduce the fiscal deficit. But the Ministry is also concerned with more fundamental structural issues in the system of pay setting: that individual pay levels for some positions may be higher than is necessary to attract and retain qualified staff and, in other cases, may be too low. And that the absence of clear rules for job grading, pay setting, and promotion may undermine staff morale. This initial report looks only at a subset of public employees-the so-called budget sphere. This includes all staff paid from the central government budget-including central government civil servants and military personnel-but excludes staff paid by local governments. These include the majority of teachers and medical personnel. A more detailed analysis of the wage setting process looks at a subset of the budget sphere: only civil servants. Note that the decision to focus on the civil service was dictated by the resource constraints of this study and the scarcity of data on public employment outside the civil service. It does not imply that problems in the civil service are more severe than elsewhere in the public sector. The report focuses on three questions: (i) does the system succeed in controlling the aggregate wage bill? (ii) Are salaries high enough to attract and retain qualified staff? And (iii) Is wage setting fair? Does it motivate staff?
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This 'Reforming Government Pay Setting Practices' report is a response to a request from the Polish Ministry of Finance (MOF) for technical advice on Poland's system of public sector pay.
... See More + The Ministry's primary aim is to contain the public sector wage bill as part of an overall effort to reduce the fiscal deficit. But the Ministry is also concerned with more fundamental structural issues in the system of pay setting: that individual pay levels for some positions may be higher than is necessary to attract and retain qualified staff and, in other cases, may be too low. And that the absence of clear rules for job grading, pay setting, and promotion may undermine staff morale. This initial report looks only at a subset of public employees-the so-called budget sphere. This includes all staff paid from the central government budget-including central government civil servants and military personnel-but excludes staff paid by local governments. These include the majority of teachers and medical personnel. A more detailed analysis of the wage setting process looks at a subset of the budget sphere: only civil servants. Note that the decision to focus on the civil service was dictated by the resource constraints of this study and the scarcity of data on public employment outside the civil service. It does not imply that problems in the civil service are more severe than elsewhere in the public sector. The report focuses on three questions: (i) does the system succeed in controlling the aggregate wage bill? (ii) Are salaries high enough to attract and retain qualified staff? And (iii) Is wage setting fair? Does it motivate staff?
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Two related propositions have been central in the recent debates on public sector reforms. The first of these is that the appropriate measure of institutional strength is the ability of public sector management systems to deliver ("functionality") rather than the institutional "form" or what these institutions look like.
... See More + This is a central idea in the World Bank's Public Sector Management (PSM) Approach 2011-2020. Second, and consistent with this, is the recognition that the process of engagement matters in the sense that how problems, solutions, and reform approaches are identified matters at least as much as what the solution is. This suggests that development institutions should focus on bringing a broad range of stakeholders together and facilitate a process of collective problem and solution identification. Recent contributions to the literature describe a "Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation" approach as a means of putting this idea into practice. While both of these propositions have considerable intellectual and intuitive appeal, they are based on an inductive logic and neither is currently backed with a large body of robust evidence. This paper contributes to this literature by documenting the experience of a civil service reform project -- the World Bank-financed Sierra Leone Pay and Performance Project -- the objective of which is to improve the performance of the civil service in Sierra Leone by targeting a narrowly defined set of critical reforms. The paper concludes that intensive, client-led engagement together with use of a results-based lending instrument provide a promising way forward on a difficult reform agenda.
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The objective of the Capacity Building for Economic Management Grant Project for Kyrgyz Republic is to assist the Recipient in establishing and institutionalizing an efficient and effective framework for formulating and implementing sustainable economic policies as well as in enhancing the capacity of public institutions responsible for the development and implementation of such policies to formulate and carry out the policies.
... See More + The restructuring aims at reallocation of project funds between categories and from the unallocated category towards strengthening the capacity of the Ministry of Economy in its current and new policy priority areas to support the government reform program including in the area of anti-corruption reform. It will also allow completion of ongoing activities under the project. The restructuring is to be financed by modifying some of the activities under component two and reallocating the unutilized and unallocated funds to finance activities that would support the implementation of the government reform program including in the area of anti-corruption reform, as well as to continue with completion of the ongoing activities under components one and three and to provide sufficient financing for component four.
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